Negotiating Gender

One of the weirdest things about having moved somewhere completely brand-new at this point in my life is that I am nearly universally read as male. It’s funny because everywhere I went before I’d be unintentionally outed — whether because I already knew people there (I knew about 5 people in Buffalo when I moved here), I was asked upfront because I seemed more androgynous, or I had to correct someone’s pronoun usage. This move has been different because I have been on testosterone for over a year. My voice is low, I can grow a little facial hair, I’ve bulked up. There’s a lot less ambiguity.

So I’ve had to come out to people. At first it was just the handful of people in my cohort who I drove home on Thursday nights, but now I’ve kind of thrown caution to the wind and begun outing myself to people everywhere. It’s funny because the reaction that I’ve been getting most often is, “Oh my goodness, I never would have guessed!” Occasionally somebody just looks at me in confusion until I tell them that I’m FTM, because they assume that it’s the other way around. So far it really hasn’t changed the relationships I have with people here, at least not in a negative way. Last night at the Essex I had a friend tell me that he respected me more because of it.

I’ve always thought a lot about the dynamics of being able to be “stealth,” because when I was younger I fantasized about being able to be so universally read as male that I didn’t have to worry about it. But now that I think of my gender as something more fluid and difficult to pin down, and now that I realize that my gender is much more complex than “I wish I were a man,” it seems like a betrayal of a lot of progress in the area of trans rights to just take it in stride and let people speculate if they are suspicious that something is different about the new games TA. I think it’s better to be open about the situation because there are so few out trans folk floating around UB. It’s also better because there are no surprises for anybody — either for my new friends or for me, when they find out.

Nevertheless, it’s strange having to out myself. For so long I’ve been universally read as queer, and assumptions have been made about me. For the first time in my life I am assumed to be a straight man, and that’s probably the weirdest thing in the world. It’s much weirder than I expected it to be, at least.

1 comment

It is really weird to be seen as a cis guy. The first time it happened to me was at an LGBT meeting, so I felt comfortable coming out. However, everyone started using the wrong pronouns all of a sudden. That’s why I’m wary of coming out now — it’s too easy for people to start seeing me as a woman (I haven’t changed my body except for binding).

Politically, it would be very valuable to come out as trans while having a typically female appearance: it’s a way of asserting that men come in all shapes and sizes. But I think I’ll be much comfortable coming out as trans after starting T, when people will have a harder time messing up their pronouns.

I think it’s neat that you’re coming out voluntarily. It might be tempting, privilege-wise, to be stealth, even though it would cost one’s personal identity.